24.12.1800 Assassination of Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte narrowly escaped death on Christmas Eve 1800. On his way to the opening night of an opera, his carriage was attacked by assassins. But the bomb apparently exploded seconds after they drove past.

Napoleon Bonaparte had gone from the Tuileries Palace to the Paris Opera for a performance of Joseph Haydn's oratorio, which the famous Austrian composer called Die Schöpfung, which translates as The Creation. It was on Christmas Eve that it had its French premiere. Napoleon found it extremely necessary to show himself among the people, especially after the recent revelation of the plot to assassinate him, also in the auditorium of the Opera House.

And another reason for going to the first stand of Parisian musical art on Christmas Eve was the general fact that he admired Haydn. "The carriage was travelling fast and was only a few dozen yards from its destination when a tremendous explosion went off at a bend in the Rue Saint-Nicaise. There were shouts, groans, cries, the neighing of horses, the noise of falling objects. In the thick smoke enveloping the narrow street, it was at first impossible to discern anything," Ivan Brož describes the events of the time in his book Assassinations.

When the smoke lifted, a gruesome scene emerged: damaged pavement, pools of blood, a broken wall and several bodies on the ground - dead and wounded. Fragments of a carriage and a crippled horse lay helplessly all over the place. Napoleon escaped unscathed.

"There was an insistent question in the air. "What is the matter? Had something happened to the First Consul? How had he survived such a terrible explosion? The first explanation is that the planted explosive charge probably went off seconds after Napoleon's carriage passed by. And it also turns out that if the coachman hadn't been so wild with his horses, the assassination of the first man of France would have been successful," explains Brož.

But Napoleon did not lose heart and ordered the journey to continue. Before the curtain rose, he stepped out of the box. When the audience learned what had happened, they rose and gave him an ovation. Napoleon, with a calm expression on his face, only bowed distantly. But when he returned to the Tuileries, it was a different Napoleon. He raged, raged, raged, cursed, most of all at Joseph Fouché, the Minister of Police. He was a representative of the "furious" in the French Revolution and later participated in the overthrow of the Jacobins.

"What is a chief of police worth if he allows an entire neighbourhood to be mined right under his nose? They're all anarchists," Napoleon shouted at the time, pointing his finger at the minister himself.

Napoleon insisted that the assassins were Jacobins. He refused to believe Fouché, who claimed that the royalists were behind the attack. Eventually they were revealed by the war veteran Carbon. The assassins were sentenced to death and executed on 20 April 1801.

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